How to Draw Animals

Although a mouse is small, drawing it can still be a challenge. Fortunately, these instructions make it easy to sketch this squeaky, cheese-loving animal.

In this section, we’ll show you how to draw the above mouse. Either draw it freehand while looking at your computer monitor or print out this page to get a closer look at each step.

Follow the red lines in each illustration to learn exactly what to draw in that step. The lines drawn in previous steps are shown in gray. We’ll show you an illustration of each step and then give you a description of how to draw it.

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Step 1: Draw a curved bean shape for the body and a teardrop shape for the head. Add two circles for the ears.

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Step 2: Draw two more circles inside the ears for the inner ears. Sketch a circle toward the bottom of the body for the thigh of one leg. Add shapes for both feet. Draw a curving, snake-like shape for the tail and two more curved shapes for the arms. Add the hands and nose.

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Step 3: Draw ovals for the eyes. Add some curved lines for the hair and eyelash details and some more for mouth and toe details.

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Step 4: Trace the pencil lines you want to keep with a felt-tip pen, and erase any extra lines.

Don't worry if your mouse drawing isn't perfect. You can practice drawing it again and again to hone your drawing skills. Now that you've learned to draw a tiny animal, in the next section we'll show you how to draw a very large one, a giraffe.